I recently read a fascinating and disturbing article in The New Yorker, by Jon Lee Anderson, on the rise and defeat of Islamists in Mali. I was struck by two particular descriptions of the Islamists’ behavior:
“In the central square, Idrissa had witnessed the beating of one of the jihadis’ own men, who had been accused by his comrades of raping a young girl. The spectators loudly criticized the jihadis for a double standard. “Everyone was angry because they didn’t kill him,” Idrissa said. Afterward, the jihadis had gone on the local radio station and warned that anyone who spoke badly about their men would be killed.”
The other:
“Then, on day two, the Islamists came,” he recalled. He had asked the leader what he wanted. Naming the northern towns of Mali, he had said, “Timbuktu, Gao, and Kidal are Muslim towns, and we want to make Sharia in them. We are not asking. We are saying what we are doing, and we’re here to make Sharia.”
What I found so troubling was not only “the usual” Al Qaeda-related atrocities, but even more so the Islamist’s clearly voiced goal of destroying an existing social system through violence, devastation of cultural heritage (vandalizing local temples and libraries). This was tied together with the idea of creating a different social order based on sexual control, and the replacement of any traces of modern knowledge by radical interpretations of old religious texts. The irony is that these readings are just as contemporary as the lifestyle the Islamists try to erase.
In my opinion, these two quotes illustrate the power of violence combined with unquestionable certainty, able to undermine an entire civilization—its customs, morals, social order, and authorities. They fall apart in the presence of arrogant brutality. The people are too “civilized,” too cultured to defend themselves. The Islamists reject a civilization they claim is morally corrupt, and instead attempt to replace it with a modern essentialist take on an imagined Golden Age of religious purity.
The case of Islamists in Mali is an extremely . . .
Read more: Reflections on Al Qaeda in Mali, and Other Radicals at the Gates
By Hakan Topal, June 19th, 2013 
Since May 27th, the people of Turkey have staged one of the most diverse, inclusive and democratic protests that Turkey has ever seen. People from every political commitment came together and acted in solidarity against a gentrification project, which intended to transform a park into a shopping mall and hotel. More importantly, protests strongly underlined the fact that the multitudes are fed-up with the erosion of their civil liberties, lack of freedom of expression and increasing state intervention in everyday life. During the course of the protests, Prime Minister Erdogan’s authoritarian and irresponsible governmental style fueled more protests. Demonstrations spread all over the country like wild fire. Police brutality against the peaceful resistance resulted in hundreds of injuries and four deaths.
Since the neoliberal-Islamist Erdogan government came to power in 2002, there has been a wave of privatization and appropriation of public and of natural resources. Numerous large-scale gentrification projects were implemented despite public opposition with direct police violence. For instance, one of the most renowned resistances in Turkey was staged at the city of Bergama. After a long legal battle the Turkish government was allowed to operate a gold mine that utilizes a dangerous cyanide-leeching process. Villagers organized themselves against this illegal governmental intrusion. Over the years, with the help of activists and lawyers, the people of Bergama repeatedly won the legal battle against the gold mine—the Turkish constitution protects the livelihood of the people. However, the Erdogan government passed consecutive executive orders to essentially circumvent the juridical system. Ultimately, Koza-Ipek Holding, who had close ties to the conservative government, started to operate the mine in 2005.
In many respects, the Bergama gold mine was the one of the first major political defeats for the people who tried to defend their commons. At the time, many liberal intellectual figures (in the Turkish context these liberals are an offshoot of neo-conservatism) provided support to the government, despite the fact that there has been ongoing massive privatization. In part, some saw the Erdogan government’s struggle to grasp control of public institutions as a justified move against “the . . .
Read more: Occupy Gezi: Reclaiming the Commons and the Collapse of Erdogan’s Domestic Policies
By Hakan Topal, June 4th, 2013 
Hakan Topal wrote this piece before the recent protests and repression in Turkey. It provides a perspective for understanding those events, as it highlights the tragedy of Syria and how Turkish policy is implicated. -Jeff
At the end of May, the Syrian civil war consumed more than 94,000 civilians and destroyed the country’s civic and cultural heritage. In addition, the civil war crystallized regional fault lines along the sectarian lines; on the one side Sunni Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, on the other side Shiite Iran, Iraq and Hezbollah (Lebanon) represent ever-increasing nationalistic conflicts.
While Assad’s army commits war crimes, kills thousands of civilians, and unleashes its terror on its population, factions within the Free Syrian Army utilize comparable tactics to bring Assad’s supporters to submission. This is a war with plenty of religious morality but without ethics. In a recent video circulated on YouTube, a Free Syrian Army guerilla cuts the chest of a dead Syrian soldier and eats it in front of the camera. How can we make sense of this absolute brutality?
Islamists who have no interest in democratic transformation hijacked the Syrian revolution. Any salient voices for the possibility of a diplomatic solution are silenced, effectively forcing the country into a never-ending sectarian war. Can the total destruction of the social and cultural infrastructure be for the sake any political agenda or social imagination? What will happen when the regime falls? Is there a future for Syrians?
And tragically, the civil war cannot be simply contained within Syria. It is quickly expanding beyond its borders, scratching local religious, sectarian and political sensitivities, especially in Turkey and Lebanon. A recent bombing in Reyhanli—a small town at the Turkish-Syrian border with largely Arab Alevi minority population—killed 54 people and subsequently, the Turkish government quickly covered up the incident and accused a left wing fraction having close ties with Assad regime of mounting the attacks. It was a premature and doubtful conclusion. Leftist guerillas have no history of attacking . . .
Read more: Turkey and Syria: On the Bankruptcy of Neo-Ottomanist Foreign Policy
By Benoit Challand, May 12th, 2011 
Unlike recent posts that have analyzed media performances, today I want to present some direct political criticism. Rather than “perform” our distinguished art of analysis, as we have recently been doing on this blog, I want to underscore the notion that powerful media set our agenda and our performing analyses are determined by what is given to us by media as bones to chew, often with quite negative results. Nothing original, but the topic and the circumstances are.
There is a fundamental difference between the way news is produced and read in the United States and Europe. Here, we have one or two authoritative print sources. Thus, much of the reflection presented at Deliberately Considered draws on reports from The New York Times. This is in sharp contrast to European practice. I miss my daily reading of at least two or three newspapers to tap into contrasting opinions or sources of information. The near monopoly in America is troublesome. Perhaps I exaggerate, but I worry that there can develop an unquestioned prevailing commonsense, with the media reiterating the obvious, instead of challenging dominant points of view and generating new areas of debate.
This struck me in the reports and commentary concerning the Hamas-Fatah reconciliation deal, announced two weeks ago. All of what has been written in the Times columns since the surprise reconciliation announcement in Cairo has re-hashed the usual storyline: Hamas is not a peace partner. Israel has good reason to feel threatened by a national unity government, and Congress should use aid as a threat to push moderates not to accept a deal with the Islamists. This Monday, an editorial summed up the argument.
The only good thing in this editorial was its subtitle, “Continued stalemate with Israel will only strengthen extremists,” but, ironically, this disappeared in the online version. Indeed, the remainder of the piece is just a series of peremptory remarks (“we have many concerns,” “the answer, to us, is clear…”) and hollow statements. Yet, intriguingly, the top ten most recommended replies to the online version were all critical of Israel, showing how people can resist the newspaper’s views.
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Read more: Media and the Palestinians: “Continued Stalemate Will Only Strengthen Extremists”
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